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Solution to today’s crossword in the New York Times
Solution to today’s SYNDICATED New York Times crossword in all other publications
CROSSWORD SETTER: David Poole
THEME: Sound expressions … each of the theme answers “sounds like” a familiar expression, all from the world of literature and/or film:
– A FARE TO REMEMBER (sounds like “Affair to Remember”)
– A COMEDY OF ERAS (sounds like “A Comedy of Errors”)
– ICY DEAD PEOPLE (sounds like “I see dead people”)
– LUKE BACK IN ANGER (sounds like “Look Back in Anger”)
COMPLETION TIME: 10m 25s
ANSWERS I MISSED: 0
Today’s Wiki-est, Amazonian Googlies
Across
The character of Norm Peterson was the only customer of the bar to appear in every episode of “Cheers”, something that one couldn’t call ironic since he loved that barstool! George Wendt played Norm, and I suppose the fact the Wendt was expelled from Notre Dame after one semester, with a 0.0 GPA, that might have helped him get the role!
5. Honshu metropolis : OSAKA
Osaka used to be called Naniwa, with the name changing to Osaka some time before 1500. “Osaka” can be translated either as “large hill” or “large slope”.
10. Sound : HALE
“Hale” is an adjective meaning “healthy”. Both the words “hale” and “healthy” derive from the the Old English “hal” meaning healthy.
14. Manitoba native : CREE
The Cree are one of the largest groups of Native Americans in North America. In the US most of the Cree nation live in Montana on a reservation shared with the Ojibwe people. In Canada most of the Cree live in Manitoba.
Uber is the German word for “over”.
The municipality of Oberammergau is in Bavaria in Germany, and is famous for its Passion Play. Back in the middle of the 17th century the inhabitants of Oberammergau made a pledge to God that if they were spared from the bubonic plague they would perform a play recounting the Passion of Christ every ten years. These days the performance involves 2000 people, all of them from the village.
“Taxi Driver” is a remarkable 1976 movie directed by Martin Scorsese, and starring Robert De Niro. The film is remarkable for some great performances, but also for sparking an attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan. Would-be assassin John Hinkley, Jr. tried to kill the President in order to impress Jodie Foster, with whom he had been obsessed since seeing her performance in the film as child prostitute Iris Steensma.
20. Org. in a 1955 merger : AFL
The American Federation of Labor was founded in 1886, making it one of the first federations of unions in the country. Over time, the AFL became dominated by craft unions, unions representing skilled workers of particular disciplines. In the early thirties, John L. Lewis led a movement within the AFL to organize workers by industry, believing this would be more effective for the members. But the craft unions refused to budge, so Lewis set up a rival federation of unions in 1932, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The two federations became bitter rivals for over two decades, until finally merging in 1955.
The Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was in the news recently, picked as MVP for the Super Bowl game at the end of the 2010 season after the Packers emerged victorious against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
22. The Minutemen of the 1-Down : UMASS
The athletic teams of the University of Massachusetts Amherst are known as the UMass Minutemen. The women’s teams are progressively referred to as as Minutewomen.
24. Cavaliers, on scoreboards : CLE
The Cleveland Cavaliers are the professional basketball team based in Cleveland, Ohio. The Cavs joined the NBA as an expansion team in 1970.
Michael J. Fox was the first choice to play the lead character, Marty McFly, in 1985’s “Back to the Future”. Unfortunately, the producers of his TV sitcom “Family Ties” would not release him to make the movie, so the crew started filming with a difference choice for the lead, actor Eric Stoltz. Weeks into production, it was decided that Stoltz was miscast, and Fox was approached again. Eventually an arrangement was made with the “Family Ties” producers to “share” Fox, which led to an exhausting schedule. Fox worked seven days a week, filming “Family Ties” during the day and working on “Back to the Future” at night, usually till 2:30 in the morning.
31. Tapenade ingredient : OLIVE
Tapenade is traditionally made from olives, capers, anchovies and olive oil. The name comes from the Provençal word for capers, “tapenas”.
Ivor Novello was one of the most popular entertainers in Britain in the early 20th century, a Welsh composer, singer and actor. On top of his success on the stage and in front of the camera, he even wrote the dialogue for the 1932 movie “Tarzan the Ape Man” starring Johnny Weissmuller.
36. Bailiwicks : AREAS
Bailiwick is a word dating back to the mid-1600s, and originally meant the “district of a bailiff”.
The most famous work of French writer Emile Zola is his 1898 open letter “J’Accuse!” written to then French president Félix Faure. It was published on the front page of a leading Paris newspaper, and accused the government of anti-Semitism in its handling of the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was a Jewish military officer in the French army, falsely accused and convicted of spying for Germany. Even after the error was discovered, the government refused to back down, choosing to let Dreyfus rot away on Devil’s Island rather than admit to the mistake. It wasn’t until 1906, 12 years after the wrongful conviction, that Dreyfus was freed and reinstated, largely due to the advocacy of Emile Zola.
39. Band of geishas? : OBI
An obi is a sash worn in some formal of dress in Japan, both by men and women, although the styles for women tend to be more ornate.
An Axel is a forward take-off jump in figure skating. It was first performed by Norwegian Axel Paulsen at the 1882 World Figure Skating championships.
When American skater Tara Lipinski won the figure skating gold medal at the 1998 Winter Olympics she was only 15 years old. To this day she is the youngest person to win an individual gold at the Winter Games.
“I see dead people” is one of the most famous lines in movies. It of course comes from M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense”, and is spoken by Haley Joel Osment to Bruce Willis. If you haven’t seen the movie, do yourself a favor and go rent it.
48. Like the Aramco oil company : SAUDI
Saudi Aramco is the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, and is state-owned. As it’s not a publicly traded enterprise, its value isn’t known for certain, but it is presumed to be the most valuable company in the world, bar none. That’s oil for you …
Uri Geller’s most famous performance is perhaps his uncomfortable failure on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson in 1973. Carson “hi-jacked” Geller on live television by providing him with spoons to bend and watches to start, none of which had been available to Geller before the show aired. Clever!
56. “Return of the Jedi” tagline? : LUKE BACK IN ANGER
Producer/writer George Lucas to some extent parted company with mainstream Hollywood when he personally funded “The Empire Strikes Back” and quit the Directors Guild of America. Lucas wanted his friend Stephen Spielberg to direct the next movie in the “Star Wars” series, “Return of the Jedi”, but his rift with Hollywood prevented him from doing so.
“Look Back in Anger” is a play by John Osborne first performed in 1956, adapted for the big screen in 1959. The British film version starred the Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, who gave very gritty performances.
Orel Hershiser is big into poker now that he has retired from Major League Baseball. He lives in Las Vegas, and when he isn’t working for ESPN, apparently he is at the poker tables at least five times a week.
The 1954 drama “On the Waterfront”, starring Marlon Brando, told a story of violence and corruption among longshoremen, and was based on a series of 24 articles written by investigative journalist Malcolm Johnston and published in “The New York Sun”. The original news stories uncovered mob infiltration on the New York City Waterfront, but in the film the location was changed to Hoboken, New Jersey.
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Elia Kazan won Oscars for best director in 1948 for “Gentleman’s Agreement” and in 1955 for “On The Waterfront”. In 1999, he was given an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award.
64. Dix halved : CINQ
In French, “cinq” (five) is half of “dix” (ten).
Down
The National Collegiate Athletic Association dates back to the Presidency of President Theodore Roosevelt. When President Roosevelt’s son broke his nose playing football at Harvard, Roosevelt turned his attention to the number of serious injuries and even deaths occurring in college sports. He instigated meetings between the major educational institutions, leading to the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States in 1906 with the remit of regulating college sports. The IAUSS evolved into the NCAA in 1910.
2. “Carmina Burana” composer : ORFF
Carl Orff was a German composer whose most famous piece of music is the dramatic cantata from 1937, “Carmina Burana”.
Jacques Cousteau made a career at sea (“mer” in French).
Jacques-Yves Cousteau started off his career in the French Navy, heading towards a working life in aviation. Because of a car accident, he had to abandon his first career choice and instead went to sea. Famously, he invented the aqualung (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus – SCUBA), and is known as the father of SCUBA diving.
8. Gung-ho : KEEN
“Kung ho” is a Chinese expression meaning “work together, cooperate”. The anglicized version “gung ho” was adopted by the Major Evans Carlson as an expression of combined spirit for his 2nd Marine Raider Battalion during WWII. From there it spread throughout the Marine Corps and back to American Society where it persists to this day.
“Humvee” is a nickname for the military vehicle developed by AM General. The full name is High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle i.e. HMMWV, or simply “Humvee”. The company introduced a civilian version in 1992, using the “Hummer” brand name.
I am an unapologetic fan of ABBA’s music. ABBA was of course the Swedish group that topped the charts in the seventies and eighties. The name ABBA is an acronym formed from the first letters of the given names of each of the band members, namely: Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn and Anni-Frid.
12. Dregs : LEES
The dregs in wine, the sediment that settles during fermentation (and sometimes in the bottle), is also called “lees”.
18. Inscription on a Wonderland cake : EAT ME
In Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, Alice follows the white rabbit down a rabbit hole and finds a bottle labelled “DRINK ME”. When she drinks the contents, it causes her to shrink. She also sees a cake with the words “EAT ME” on it, which she does and she grows so big she finds it hard to stand up. After eating the cake, she says the famous words, “Curiouser and curiouser”.
Leonhard Euler was a brilliant Swiss mathematician and physicist, a pioneer in the fields of logarithms and graph theory.
23. Bxe5 or 0-0-0, in chess : MOVE
In chess notation, “bxe5” means “bishop takes the piece on square e5”. “0-0-0” means “castle with the queenside rook”.
25. What an accused perpetrator needs : ALIBI
“Alibi” is the Latin word for “elsewhere”, as in I claim that I was “elsewhere” when the crime was committed … I have an “alibi”.
26. Palindromic car name : CIVIC
Introduced in 1972, the Honda Civic is the second-oldest brand of Japanese car made for the US today (only the Toyota Corolla has been around longer). Today’s Civic is a compact car, but the original was smaller, and classed as a sub-compact. The first design had a transverse-mounted engine and front-wheel drive to save on space, copying the design introduced with the British Mini. The Civic Hybrid that I drive these days is the best car I’ve ever owned quite frankly.
When something is different in America than it is in the UK, the Irish way tends to be the same as the British way (spelling, driving, rules of the road etc.). But in Ireland we have Yield signs, just like in America, whereas in the UK such signs say “Give Way”. Just a little bit of trivia …
The first test of a hydrogen bomb was in 1954 at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It may have been a technical success, but it was an environmental disaster, largely because the actual yield of 15 megatons was unexpected (4-6 megatons was anticipated). The fallout caused many deaths, and led to a spate of birth defects in generations to come.
34. “No way, laddie!” : NAE
Nae is the Scottish vernacular for “no”.
Stephen Rea is an Irish actor, whose most famous role was that of the “retired” IRA man in the brilliant 1992 film “The Crying Game”. He also starred in the chilling movie “Stuck”, a 2007 film that is based on a true story about a woman who commits a hit and run on a homeless man. The woman leaves the scene of the crime with the victim still “stuck” in her windshield. The woman then leaves the man to die in her garage. Chilling, eh? But as I said, a true story …
40. Ignore the cue cards, say : AD LIB
“Ad libitum” is a Latin phrase meaning “at one’s pleasure”. In common usage the phrase is usually shortened to “ad lib”. On the stage the concept of an “ad lib” is very familiar. For example, an actor who substitutes his own words for forgotten lines uses an ad lib, or a director may instruct an actor to use his or her own words at a particular point in a performance to promote a feeling of spontaneity.
49. Je ne sais quoi : AURA
An aura is an intangible quality that surrounds a person or thing, a “je ne sais quoi”. “Je ne sais quoi” is French for “I don’t know”.
The ukulele originated in the 1800s, and mimicked a small guitar brought to the Hawaiian Islands by Portuguese immigrants.
52. Cincinnati sitcom station : WKRP
The sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati” was an MTM production, the company established by Mary Tyler Moore and her husband to produce “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”. “WKRP” was a successful show when originally aired, but then became a blockbuster in syndication. It became MTM’s most watched program, even outstripping the original “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”.
53. Aptly named fruit : UGLI
The ugli fruit is a hybrid of an orange and a tangerine, first discovered growing wild in Jamaica, where most ugli fruit comes from today.
55. Mesopotamia, today : IRAQ
Mesopotamia was the land that lay between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates that flow through modern-day Iraq. The name “Mesopotamia” means “between the rivers”.
The fictional store, Kwik-E-Mart, is operated by Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, on “The Simpsons” TV show. The convenience store owner doesn’t seem to be making much use of his Ph. D. in computer science that he earned in the US. His undergraduate degree is from Caltech (the Calcutta Technical Institute), where he graduated top of his class … of seven million students …
58. I.B.M. competitor : NEC
NEC is the name that the Nippon Electric Company chose for itself outside of Japan after a re-branding exercise in 1983.
For the sake of completion, here is a full listing of all the answers:
Across
1. Only patron on “Cheers” to appear in all 275 episodes : NORM
5. Honshu metropolis : OSAKA
10. Sound : HALE
14. Manitoba native : CREE
15. Needing nourishment : UNFED
16. Over, in Oberammergau : UBER
17. “Taxi Driver” tagline? : A FARE TO REMEMBER
20. Org. in a 1955 merger : AFL
21. Super Bowl XLV M.V.P. Rodgers : AARON
22. The Minutemen of the 1-Down : UMASS
23. Buy-now-pay-later arrangement: Abbr. : MTGE
24. Cavaliers, on scoreboards : CLE
25. “Back to the Future” tagline? : A COMEDY OF ERAS
31. Tapenade ingredient : OLIVE
32. Actor/composer Novello : IVOR
33. Truckload : TON
35. Cat’s tongue? : JIVE
36. Bailiwicks : AREAS
38. Dreyfus defender : ZOLA
39. Band of geishas? : OBI
40. Lipinski leap : AXEL
41. Have a cow : CALVE
42. “Titanic” tagline? : ICY DEAD PEOPLE
46. Archaic : OLD
47. Bumps hard : RAMS
48. Like the Aramco oil company : SAUDI
51. Teem : SWARM
53. Geller with a spoon-bending act : URI
56. “Return of the Jedi” tagline? : LUKE BACK IN ANGER
59. Pitcher-turned-sportscaster Hershiser : OREL
60. Grammatically dissect : PARSE
61. Marlon’s “On the Waterfront” director : ELIA
62. Striped swimmer : BASS
63. Worked at home? : UMPED
64. Dix halved : CINQ
Down
1. March Madness org. : NCAA
2. “Carmina Burana” composer : ORFF
3. Down-to-earth : REAL
4. Cousteau’s milieu : MER
5. Power failure : OUTAGE
6. Sawed logs, so to speak : SNORED
7. Big do : AFRO
8. Gung-ho : KEEN
9. Naval V.I.P.: Abbr. : ADM
10. G.M. brand discontinued in 2010 : HUMMER
11. “Dancing Queen” group : ABBA
12. Dregs : LEES
13. Slips up : ERRS
18. Inscription on a Wonderland cake : EAT ME
19. Swiss who pioneered in graph theory : EULER
23. Bxe5 or 0-0-0, in chess : MOVE
24. Corp. money execs : CFOS
25. What an accused perpetrator needs : ALIBI
26. Palindromic car name : CIVIC
27. Triangular traffic sign : YIELD
28. They travel down fallopian tubes : OVA
29. Bikini, for one : ATOLL
30. Figure out : SOLVE
31. Spanish eye : OJO
34. “No way, laddie!” : NAE
36. Fired : AXED
37. “Michael Collins” actor : REA
38. Microwaves : ZAPS
40. Ignore the cue cards, say : AD LIB
41. Short stop? : COMMA
43. Mountain airs : YODELS
44. Purpose of an ode : PRAISE
45. Like most runs, in baseball : EARNED
48. Person who uses a sleeve for a napkin, say : SLOB
49. Je ne sais quoi : AURA
50. Strings at luaus : UKES
51. E-mail from a Nigerian prince, probably : SCAM
52. Cincinnati sitcom station : WKRP
53. Aptly named fruit : UGLI
54. It may hold your horses : REIN
55. Mesopotamia, today : IRAQ
57. Kwik-E-Mart owner on “The Simpsons” : APU
58. I.B.M. competitor : NEC
I think the 1955 merger was between the afl (american federation of labor) and the CIO. I love this blog!
Hi Martye8,
Note to self … READ THE CLUE before writing about it!! 🙂
Thanks for watching my back, Marty. I fixed the error.
And thanks for the kind words about the blog. I appreciate the sentiment.